Seriously, why? Sure I look at the size of the drive when I buy a laptop. I look at it and go "Why the hell can't I get something smaller?" Smaller and faster means a big speed increase and the ability to NOT lose a lot of when the laptop inevitably gets bumped/dropped/water spills/etc. NO valuable data should reside primarily on a laptop hard drive. So when the smallest drive I could order for my wife's Lenovo was 250GB, I went with that... Let me tell you, her previous laptop had a 20GB drive, and it was only a hair over half full. My x40 is dual boot, with a 40GB drive. Sure, I've got some games on there, and sure, modern games are bigger, but you can't tell me I need anything more than 64GB tops.
Now maybe I'm odd for having a NAS at home that's RAID backed and easily accessible, but in this day and age, it doesn't seem that odd to me, nor was it expensive it doesn't get dropped, it doesn't mind if it loses a drive, it doesn't get hot, or make noise and create heat or suck battery down when I'm working on the laptop and if I work on files there, they stay centrally located. Now maybe I don't have tons of copies of DVD's on my laptop, and perhaps other people do, but DVD only tops out at 9GB a pop, and how many people rip Bluray's to play with them on trips?
I think it's really just a ploy by the HDD manufacturers to try to make us want more space for no good reason.I have a total of 750GB on my NAS, it's been 250+GB Free for the last two years and I've not made a concerted effort to delete things like videos and pictures when I'm done with them. Unless people are doing lots of HD video editing with uncompressed files on their laptops, I don't see how anyone can use 500GB+ drives in there during the current decade. I'm sure we'll want more eventually when screen res gets to a point where vidoes need to store greater than HD, but it seems kinda like a stupid to benchmark for a laptop.